Exact Solution Methods for Problems in Sustainable Transportation and Alternative Energy Systems

Özlem Mahmutoğulları/Eindhoven University of Technology

Resource limitations and uncertainties are common in real-world situations when making decisions on inventory management, transportation, supply chain management, network design, and facility location. These challenges necessitate novel ideas and techniques to mitigate the effects of limitations and handle uncertainty. We address critical challenges in sustainable transportation and energy systems by developing exact solution methods for complex logistics and infrastructure planning problems. We focus on three problems, which are the inventory routing problem, the alternative fuel refueling station location problem with routing, and the supply chain network design problem for a new sustainable product. For the inventory routing problem, we consider the product substitution option and propose a branch-and-cut algorithm to optimize routing and substitution decisions, reducing total costs and environmental impact. For the refueling station location problem, we first address decision-dependent uncertainties in alternative fuel vehicle flows to ensure that alternative fuel station infrastructure is efficient and robust. We later extend the problem by considering multi- period planning for the strategic deployment of alternative fuel stations and develop mathematical models that account for flow evolution over time. Lastly, we design a supply chain for a chemical product produced using sustainable technology to support the product’s adoption by the chemical industry. In these works, we employ mixed-integer linear programming, robust optimization, and multi-period planning techniques in our solution methods and demonstrate the performance of our methods on real-world networks, showing significant improvements in the decision-making processes of systems that contribute to the broader goal of reducing environmental impact while meeting demand and financial constraints.

Short Bio

Özlem Mahmutoğulları is a postdoctoral researcher in the Operations, Planning, Accounting, and Control Group at Eindhoven University of Technology. She obtained her PhD in Business Economics in the Operations Research Group at KU Leuven. Her research interests are combinatorial optimization, mixed integer programming, and robust optimization. She devises methods to address uncertainties and optimize environmental and financial aspects in supply chain management, transportation, and facility location.

Venue

Seminar will be online on September 27 at 4 p.m., for link Click*